Chapter One of Adam's Big Bang

A calamitous prediction.

“...And nothing would be left, not even memory.”

Only rounding a corner and running smack into God would be more extraordinary and yet this barely lesser revelation was being tossed off so casually by a confident voice.

It was a late night radio interview of a Harvard physicist who had little else to say. Adam, at first barely picking up on any of it, had been sitting at the kitchen table, rather more interested in what his dogs were up to than what this radio chatter might be all about. But slowly, the physicist’s pronouncement, with most of its cosmological implications, was beginning to get to him.

Oddly enough, this astounding bit of aired commentary would fail to draw even the slightest reaction from the press. Nor would it be picked up on by the general radio audience either. No more, it would seem, than by his dogs. They remained at their usual stations for that time of night, the Doberman erect, staring up at him intently and demandingly, her concerns fixed solely on the merest possibility of still another biscuit to devour; the wolfhound sprawled inertly, disjointedly, jaw pressed against the floor, but occasionally raising one or other brow as if in expectation of something about to happen. Unbeknownst to him, it had already. That is if one considers the total revision of one man’s essential orientation, a happening.

The radio program was mere superficial media fluff sparked by a new astronomical observation appearing to confirm, at long last, apparently once and for all, that the big bang theory was truly the way everything had come about. It was not any interest in that remote beginning which managed to divert Adam’s attention from his beloved dogs. It was what now, all of a sudden, was so obviously predictable by way of a universal ending. In fact, if one accepted that dreadful finality, one would be hard put to harbor any lingering fascination for whatever had moved the beginning.

For what the prominent Harvard physicist had said, and all too matter of factly, was quite startling. Based upon recent findings that proved the big bang theory, the heavenly bodies were set upon a diverging course and racing apart at great velocity. Nothing much new in that. What was new, however, was the now generally accepted conviction that eventually all of those stars and planets must at some point in the future lose their forward momentum, decelerate, stall, and fall back in reverse direction colliding with one another. Consequently, all matter would converge to form a small sphere of infinite density and because of this enormous compaction there’d follow an utterly destructive explosion, another big bang, and the shaping of new emergences.

What might come of such a cataclysm and fresh start, by way of life forms or anything else, was to the Harvard fellow’s mind unpredictable, save for a singular certainty.

He reasoned that since everything existing must disappear in that blast which would take all matter back down to atomic and subatomic particles, so also would every man-made mechanism affirming his existence. There could not survive, he argued, any sort of inscription, space drifting capsule with encoded messages, tapes, hard drives, computer chips. Nothing would endure.

And if, by the remotest possibility, some kind of intelligence did eventually evolve from out a new primordium, there’d be no way for it to know what had gone before. For the thing we call memory, it would be a complete wipeout.

Well so what? Why should Adam care about a catastrophe slated to come bearing down on us in a billion years or more? He’d be long gone by then. That was for sure. And anyway, hadn’t certain religions even foretold such eternal recurrent goings and comings? Big bang restructurings might very well be the integral pattern for an order of things somehow ordained. All the same, Adam became increasingly uneasy, finding no comfort by the recollection of what he ordinarily regarded as so much crack pot religious mumbo jumbo, however much it fell in line with new wave science. In fact he’d prefer to be as ignorant about all of this as his dogs. At his time of life he could do without the disequilibrium of any confounding new revelations. Things were all right just the way they were. In short order he found himself wishing that this particular disclosure could be made to go away.

For that reason, in spite of the lateness of the hour, he found himself hard-pressed to sift this matter through, maybe even get it behind him. Past midnight or not, he’d stay up a while longer. Going to bed was out of the question. For what? Just to lie awake, anguished by the question of why it should be that after so many millions of years, all of this had to be happening now, to him, in his time? After all, he’d turned sixty-six. It wouldn’t have been too much longer for him to pass on in a state of blissful ignorance of this impending disaster, peculiarly comforted by his heretofore prevailing notion that whatever the eventual fate of the ground under him, there had to be at least some kind of stability out there in the cosmos. Sure, planets might come and go, but who’d imagine them all vaporizing at once, in a flash, with the possibility of any kind of communication or record keeping going up in smoke at the same time? And nothing to be left to communicate with or about?

Adam, whether or not he’d spoken of it, had nurtured the idea, which he found comforting, that every human move, even his own puny ones, could always manage to be somehow recorded and memorialized. He was prompted to recall that his mother had sometimes cautioned him, “Remember, Adam. Nothing is forever.” But she’d only meant that things didn’t last. She’d had no idea that forever, even the mere concept of it, was to be up for grabs.

A short time later, as was his custom, Adam led the dogs outside to relieve themselves. Then, having given up on the prospect of anything more to eat, they ambled disinterestedly towards other rooms in his old house to settle down for the night. It was not the best time of day for his sixty-six-year-old brain to be speculating or attempting to unravel monumental scientific propositions, but because it needed to be done, how to begin?

Music might help. Adam had always found that recorded music stirred him, sometimes even managing his transport into inspirational dimensions often attended by colorful visual aberrations. Not loudly though, this time, or he’d disturb his wife, who was by then asleep in the room above. Bach sprang instantly to mind as the clear choice. He started up a recently acquired recording of the Toccata and Fugue, performed on the great organ of a Dresden cathedral.

With the first pedal notes, however, he sensed, unfortunately, that extreme loudness was indispensable to his needs. To that end he switched off briefly then resumed his listening, but over headphones, so as not to awaken his wife.

There had often been moments like this when Adam would set his mind adrift under the influence of a favored musical selection. Unusual imagery was apt to appear or a novel idea take form. On occasion, such experiences had managed to change his way of thinking or to effect a turn in his day to day affairs.

But nothing of that sort was happening now. The truth was, and Adam didn’t know it, but he might never have another musically induced brain storm. Not because this particular music was failing to affect him. It was, and to an exaggerated degree. But the sad part of his present situation was that the music, although no longer thought provoking, was indeed transparently beautiful, exquisitely moving, even perfect. There was not the possibility of it being excelled. In fact, this was the first time he could really enjoy the Toccata in that kind of way, a sensual one. But an odd new mental drift had taken hold of him obliging a response to the import of all sound, all music, this or any other Bach composition, as well as everything else, being utterly doomed.

With the future now astonishingly finite and fragile, paradoxically, the present had been made barren, however delicious it might seem for the moment. But if extremities of sensation were only to be rooted in the ephemeral, Adam wondered what if anything, might be left to give him sustained satisfaction.

Certainly more customary kinds of detachment, those cultivated to foster the lesser fulfillments of a creative bent of mind, were hardly still appealing. They were quite pointless, anyway, in this newly limited universe. To bother about evolving anything, including the powers of his mind, made absolutely no sense in the new found reality of the impending galactic blind alley.

That is how Adam, at sixty-six, a newly retired surgeon, who’d been casting about for productive ways to spend the rest of his life, began for the first time to see his situation in a completely different light. No longer was he apt to dwell on what had been important to him in the past or even on what might seem promising about the future. For how could anything, be it of the past or future, be regarded as having significance? Nor was there a conceivable point in trying to make distinctions between them.

In the end, would it not be all the same? Was a world, a man, a man’s works, his own works, any more important than were his dogs, or for that matter a single one of their fleas? Everything was headed for the same oblivion. Was it not? It had even become reasonable to suggest that only atoms or quarks were privileged with significance, for they at least had a claim on immortality and could forever rearrange the shape of things to come.

A brief radio program had moved Adam to give up on work and on life as he had always taken them and to end his day wondering what might possibly be contrived to afford him pleasure.